Elevate Your Communication: Breaking Bad News, Humane Decisions, Medical Meaning in Pet Loss, Lessons from Loss
Offering Description
Navigating end-of-life cases is one of the most emotionally challenging aspects of veterinary practice. This on-demand offering brings together four essential sessions to equip veterinary team members with the skills, understanding, and emotional resilience needed to support clients, colleagues, and themselves through these difficult moments. Modules explore aspects of the end-of-life experience, from understanding the complexities behind owners’ decisions and delivering bad news with tender compassion, to processing grief through team case reviews and debriefs, and guiding clients toward healing through meaning-making conversations.
By strengthening communication skills, fostering understanding over judgment, and building emotional literacy around grief and loss, participants will be better prepared to foster trust, compassion, and resilience in their daily work. The knowledge and tools gained from these sessions will help veterinary professionals sustain their own wellbeing while providing stronger, more compassionate support to those they serve.
Each session includes content from top-rated ACVIM Forum programming featuring newly designed interactive and supportive elements, allowing participants to reflect and actively apply new insights in real time. In alignment with the ACVIMs mission, vision, and values, this new offering has been designed with accessibility and affordability in mind, to ensure this content is approachable for veterinary team members at any stage of their career.
Sessions included in this offering are:
- Breaking Bad News: Being Honest and Tender
- Humane Decisions: Decreasing Judgement through Understanding
- Helping Clients Find Medical Meaning in Pet Loss
- Lessons From Loss: A Reflection on the Cases that Change Us
Learning Objectives
- Utilize structured communication techniques to engage owners with honesty and compassion when delivering bad news, while managing emotional reactions and promoting shared decision-making.
- Recognize the multiple factors that contribute to owners’ end-of-life decisions and apply strategies to foster greater understanding and reduce judgment in veterinary practice.
- Apply strategies to support clients in making meaning from the loss of a pet, enhancing client rapport and promoting healthier grief outcomes through skillful communication.
- Understand different approaches, including grand rounds, morbidity and mortality rounds, TMRs and debriefs, to help teams learn from difficult cases and move toward healing.
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Session Descriptions
Sheilah Robertson, PhD, DACVAA, DACAW, DECVAA, DECAWBM (AWSEL), MRCVS
Breaking Bad News: Being Honest and Tender
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Speaker Intro: After graduating from the University of Glasgow Dr Robertson undertook specialized training in anesthesia and pain management. She is board certified in anesthesia and in animal welfare by the respective American and European Colleges and holds a certificate in small animal acupuncture. She is also a certified Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine Palliative and End-of-Life practitioner. She is the senior medical director of Lap of Love Veterinary Hospice, a large network of veterinarians dedicated to end-of-life care. Dr Robertson is also a courtesy Professor in the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.
Session Description: Breaking bad news to pet caregivers is something all veterinarians must do but often struggle with. In this session tips on how to start a conversion about a serious illness or euthanasia will be discussed; this includes engaging with the owner(s), gaining trust and rapport, verbal priming, verbal and non-verbal communication, supporting the owner / family, understanding the difference between empathy and sympathy, focusing on the pet’s needs and being non-judgmental. It is also important to understand the caregiver’s budgets which are financial, time, emotional and physical. These conversations are less stressful and more effective when armed with the correct tools. A structured approach with key steps keeps you on track and engages the caregiver in shared decision making. Thinking of these as “serious” or “difficult” conversations can cause anxiety before even stepping in the room and therefore thinking of them as tender discussions is a valuable way to change one’s mindset. Owners may direct their grief and anger at you, and it is important to understand the underlying cause of their emotions and how to redirect the conversation. All team members can benefit from mastering these skills.
Michelle Albino, LVT, VTS (Anesthesia & Analgesia)
Humane Decisions: Decreasing Judgement through Understanding
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Speaker Intro: Michelle Albino is an LVT in Brooklyn, New York who has her VTS in anesthesia and analgesia. She serves as director of training and education at ASPCA in New York City. Michelle has been working in veterinary medicine for over 25 years and is passionate about bridging the gap between effective, high-quality anesthesia and pain management for shelter and general practices, increasing access to care, and elevating the wellbeing of the veterinary community.
Session Description: Pets are 100% dependent on their owners to provide for their physical and behavioral welfare, make informed decisions about their medical care and bear the financial responsibility, take them to appointments and follow up with treatment at home. Considering these responsibilities along with factors related to the pet’s quality of life including the pet’s medical diagnosis and related prognosis, the pet’s physical comfort and behavioral issues generates a “Family Quality of Life” (FQoL). Throughout this lecture, we'll examine the multiple considerations owners have when deciding to either move forward with care for their pet, or decide to humanely euthanize, and ways we can better understand these decisions to help relieve the discomfort and burnout veterinary staff may feel around these decisions.
Rachel Wright, MSW, LICSW, VSW-CP (Veterinary Social Work)
Helping Clients Find Medical Meaning In Pet Loss
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Speaker Intro: Rachel Wright is a licensed independent clinical social worker, therapist, and veterinary social worker. She has worked in the counseling/social work fields for 25+ years within a wide variety of settings and has integrated the human-animal bond into professional practice for the past 20 years. She worked at Pet Partners as the Director of Programs/Therapy Animal Program Manager and was an embedded veterinary social worker within a large specialty and emergency hospital. Rachel owns the private practice Paws To Connect Counseling, LLC, where she specializes in grief, trauma, caregiver fatigue, women's issues, mental health in veterinary medicine, and supervises masters-level interns in social work, counseling, and family therapy to work within these intersections.
Session Description: Finding meaning making in grief is integral to hope, healing and emotional growth after the loss of a beloved pet. Research has shown that meaning making in the grief process results in the key difference between positive and negative bereavement outcomes for clients. As clinicians, your clients initially look to you to validate, help them reconstruct, and find medical meaning making around their animal’s death. This presentation will provide you with psychoeducation on the grief process, and help you understand and leverage the key benefits of medical meaning making to improve client rapport and experience. You will be equipped with strategies to move into effective, skillful, and compassionate conversations with your clients.
Sarah Harris, CVT, VTS (ECC)
Lessons From Loss: A Reflection on the Cases that Change Us
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Speaker Intro: Sarah has spent the last 13 years focusing her career on Emergency and Critical Care. She's worked at DoveLewis Emergency and Specialty in Portland, Oregon for the last 10 years and is currently the Director of Patient Care. Additionally, Sarah is an adjunct faculty member at Portland Community College and volunteers her time with the Oregon Veterinary Technician and Assistant Association having served on the board for 8 years. Sarah has also spent time in Namibia volunteering with the Cheetah Conservation Fund. She enjoys mentoring technicians, teaching them to become central members of a patient’s medical team particularly in the areas of mechanical ventilation and extracorporeal therapies.
Session Description: Morbidity & mortality case reviews, grand rounds, and debriefing can help veterinary professionals process loss. In this lecture, two cases will be studied taking into account both the medical review and psychosocial well-being of the staff involved.
Course Information
- Date: On Demand
- Location: Virtual
- Audience: ACVIM Diplomates and Candidates, ECVIM Diplomates and Candidates, Affiliate Diplomates and Candidates, Veterinarians, Veterinary Technicians, Veterinary Assistants, Students and Allied Professionals
- Specialty: Multispecialty